#patientchat 9/27: How Can We “Flip the Clinic”?

Recently, we came across an initiative by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to highlight ways to “flip the clinic” or to change the way doctor’s visits are done today. In their words (emphasis mine):

The doctor’s office (or clinic or other care setting) is where health care happens. It remains the essential hub for clinical care. But what occurs in that room isn’t exactly ideal—or even state-of-the-art. The doctor-patient encounter is fraught. Too cursory to be exhaustive (the infamous fifteen-minute median office visit), too infrequent to create an honest relationship (one or two visits a year at best), and too anonymous to be personal (the average primary care doc has more than 2,300 patients), appointments are a high-cost, high-resource encounter with surprisingly limited value and limited returns. We can do better.

Their website has many examples of ways that organizations around the country are trying to “flip the clinic” to fundamentally change how the doctor’s appointment works to be better for patients. One thing struck us when we were looking at these examples:

While a couple of these focus on educating doctors, and a couple look at improving the health of the community as a whole, all the other interventions are all about empowering patients. Whether it was giving patients access to their medical records with the Open Notes or Blue Button initiatives or giving patients more say in the healthcare they receive through Patient Partners, the Flip the Clinic initiative seems to recognize that with patients’ voices driving the process, we can really transform the healthcare experience.

That is also our mission at Intake.Me. We believe that by giving patients the tools to take control over their own care — like tools to capture their data — patients will be able to truly “flip the clinic” and transform the doctor’s visit from being streamlined for providers to being streamlined for patients.

What do you think about the idea of “flipping the clinic”? What do you think the roles of patients and caregivers should be in making the doctor’s visit better?

Darla Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Intake.me and a life long technology enthusiast and nerd. Intake.me is a digital health company focused on empowering people in their health. Darla's career in technology spans two decades, where she has successfully led engineering teams in Los Angeles to build highly scalable, consumer-facing platforms for companies like ThisNext.com, Comedy.com, Taschen Books, E*TRADE, The Jim Henson Company, and many more. She transitioned her focus into healthcare after going through cancer treatment in 2010 and finding so few technologies created from the patient's perspective. She is a strong voice for patient-centered, value based care, as well as accessibility and transparency. She is also a registered yoga teacher and meditation teacher.